


fortune favors the

by scioscribe



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Gen, Light Angst, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 06:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5573665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hercules Mulligan: you knock him down and he gets back up again.  Even if history doesn't have its eyes on him.</p><p>(All the things you think won’t matter when you’re young, scrappy, and hungry start to matter one hell of a lot more when you're not.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	fortune favors the

The morning after the Continental Army takes the city—

( _HERE COMES THE GENERAL_ , someone calls in the street. _RISE UP_.)

\--Hercules Mulligan hosts George Washington himself at his breakfast table. And damn but do they play it like it’s spring cleaning instead of a tête-a-tête between a spy and his commander or even one between a local entrepreneur and a potential customer (yeah, Hercules took those measurements, made those pants, knows that inseam—behind every great man is a tailor who could have slipped up with the needle and let a stitch burst or something cup too tight, and has he? No, he has not, his work is fucking impeccable). It’s not about eggs and ham, this. It’s about having the windows wide open and his house a lantern to the whole gray just-post-dawn street so Washington can cast his vote of confidence and make a point that will save Mulligan’s life like Mulligan has saved his. The breakfast table meeting is the General’s way to politely convey: See this pretty motherfucker? He’s with me.

And for the rest of his life, Hercules Mulligan is going to be the guy who knows how George Washington likes his eggs, which is no little thing. You can dine out on that, you can do business on it, you can spend it like money.

Washington asks to see Cato, too, which is also no little thing.

(Cato can spin that conversation into gold, too, but nobody’s ever going to quite believe it: ask Miss Phillis Wheatley, who got a book blurb and a sit-down from him and who will die in ’84 impoverished, in squalor, so much for the goodwill of America’s favorite founding father.

Mulligan frees Cato that afternoon, because he believes in it, because it’s the right thing, because he’s a hero, and they’re going to build a new nation on a better foundation.

Washington gets wish-washy; gives in to the South, his pocketbook, his wife, the land he has, the money he wants to keep. Frees his slaves in his will—why not? he’s got no descendants—and dies half-proud and half-ashamed, doing more than some and knowing it’s not enough, knowing there’s blood spattered on the leaves of the fig tree, skin shucked off the palms of hands that handled the vine.

And Mulligan buys cotton from the South. So where’s the new foundation? They haven’t found it yet, won’t, maybe can’t, because they’re not new men themselves. They’ve both been born in shit and it’s hard work working the shovel.

Not that that matters much to Cato, or Washington’s left-hand man William Lee. Fortune doesn’t favor the bold, fortune favors the fortune: follow the money and see where it goes. Unless you get lucky, where luck is the slow sweating out of another man’s conscience, and after some long eventually you walk out the door, and you’re the man who waited on the President, or spied for him, and nobody. Gives. A shit.

So no little thing, but also nothing too big, either.)

“The war rested on your shoulders at times as much as on any other man’s,” Washington says to Mulligan, “and I count the preservation of my own life as your doing, as well.”

“People say a lot of things when they talk over your head.”

“And now a lot of those people are dead. And that’s thanks to you,” pitching that toward the window like a ball, like he’s tossing his gratitude out onto the streets where the gathering crowd— _hey, we’re not listening, there’s not history going on in there or anything, what’re you looking at us for?_ —and he’s got this little smile on his face, tired and amused, like he’s glad to be doing something so simple and uncomplicatedly good as returning a favor for a favor.

“Any word of my friends?”

“Some I should have given you at once: that both Hamilton and Lafayette are well, the latter currently home and raising my namesake.”

“The first of many, I’m sure, sir.”

“Perhaps, but none so dear. Hamilton, you’ll be unsurprised to know, has passed the time largely in writing, and sending me a missive once a week wherein he congratulates me on the good sense I showed in giving him a command at Yorktown.”

Yeah, Mulligan knows the experience of being on the receiving end of Hamilton’s inexhaustible barrage of self-satisfaction—one time he got woken up during a blizzard not by shivering but by Ham throwing a blanket over him and crowing, “Didn’t I say it was going to turn cold?” But he didn’t mind it much and he doesn’t think Washington does, either, because he sounds like a man recounting the adventurous mishap of a favorite puppy or son, has got that “guess what annoying/wonderful thing he did _now_ ” tone to him. Hamilton has that effect on people.

Neither of them mentions Laurens. Once-favored son? (Not of his father.) Once-favored friend? (Hell, the life-blood of them, the beat of their heart.) But it’s funny how quickly you disappear once you’re dead and gone, how you even get buried in conversations, awkward little spaces, where no one wants to say your name.

Happens to the living sometimes too.

Breakfast wraps up: Washington blots grease off his lips and passes his compliments onto the cook.

“And my heartfelt gratitude to you once more, Mr. Mulligan.”

“Sons of Liberty forever,” Mulligan says. “We bleed Betsy Ross, sir. Don’t sweat it—I think I’ll miss it.”

“There’s something straightforward about a war.”

Mulligan nods. “Even behind the scenes. But politics, sir, that’s just war in different clothes, and I know clothes.” He nods at the onlookers in the street, who are debating their placement on the cobblestones, like _rear orchestra or front mezzanine?_ “But I think I’ve got a lot of non-metaphorical sewing in my future, thanks to this, thanks to you.”

So they do the whole awkward goodbye thing of two people who know each other both extremely well and not at all, and Mulligan shuts the door behind him, and there’s the whole rest of his life ahead of him: sewing pants? Sure. But socially advanced? Hell yeah. He just had eggs with the motherfucking future President.

*

Except later Mulligan’s grabbing a beer with Hamilton and Ham has ink on his fingers—what else is new?—and a murder trial on his mind, and if Mulligan has a shot every time Ham whines about Burr, he’ll be under the table well before midnight. Ham’s got that glassy-eyed the-future-is-his-bitch look and he’s drinking like he’s running out of time, which doesn’t exactly make for good conversation.

Out on the street, he’s slumping against Mulligan, and what’s the kid saying? “I miss Laurens.” He swipes a hand across his nose and suddenly he looks nineteen again, scrawny, shaky, and, well, shit, it’s not like Mulligan didn’t _know_. But he has no time to talk, or even to warn Hamilton against talking because some things don’t get said on street-corners, because Ham is going on, always going on, and onto something else now, “And I’m such poor company.”

“Hey, no,” Mulligan says.

“No?”

“You did what you said you were always going to do—made us all proud.” He bumps shoulders with Hamilton. “Laurens included.”

(Um, well, mostly, probably—Mulligan is going to watch, later, as Hamilton bargains with the South and so fires a cannon-blast through Laurens’s passion and work, and then again as he keeps those American boots on American soil and it’s boom-gone with Lafayette’s ambitions, too. Reynolds Pamphlet hits the presses and there goes Eliza. “I shoot off at the mouth,” Hamilton told Mulligan once, and yeah, he does. But he also burns, bright like a star. Even being in the same city with the guy, Mulligan feels the heat. And isn’t that what they fought for, as much as anything else? The hot, fiery shake-up of it all? Legacy, that’s a garden; war’s the slash-and-burn that gives life to the soil.)

“You and Burr are the only friends I have left,” Hamilton says, clinging to Mulligan’s jacket as they walk down the street. “And Burr is—Burr.”

“The worst.”

“The actual worst, except he’s _so good_. If he would just collaborate with me, I wouldn’t be—” He blinks fuzzily at Mulligan. “Huh. Did anyone ever tell you that you look kind of like James Madison?”

That’s the last time he actually sees Hamilton face-to-face. He’s got Ham’s drool on the lapel of his coat and booze-breath in his face and Hamilton is on his way up—Secretary of the Treasury, best enemy of Thomas Jefferson, a boot in the teeth of Aaron Burr’s ambitions—and Mulligan, well, sews pants. All the things you think won’t matter when you’re young, scrappy, and hungry start to matter one hell of a lot more when you're not. And Mulligan, no matter how many breakfasts he’s had with the President, isn’t the guy you bring around to cabinet meetings. He got his commendation for being beneath notice.

And he slips right back into that.

‘Cause you can tailor your clothes all you like, but if you’ve got the wrong name and the wrong way of talking, the right people just don’t know you once they don’t need you.

*

Hamilton will fast-track Mulligan’s son into the law and they’ll have a quick flurry of letters, full of remember-when and good-will promises to meet up soon.

He doesn’t take this too seriously.

He wants to tell his son to choose favors over friendship every time—any good man of renown will try to repay a favor. If you can, go for breakfast with the President; he personally recommends that, it’s a good one. But friendships—soon enough they’ll be confusing you with someone else, someone who’s on their mind instead of you. He never lost track of Hamilton, but Hamilton lost track of him, and he wasn’t in the undiscovered country—raise a glass—or even France. He just wasn’t in the room.

But that’s heavy shit to lay on someone so young, and he wouldn’t have believed it at that age himself. When he was a kid, he thought he and his friends were going to lay waste to Manhattan: shake up the world and snake their blood into each other’s veins, live and die for each other, be legends in their own time. He wants his son to have that, too.

 _In loco parentis_ or just the _locus_ himself, Mulligan is a good dad.

(If this is where you fit in history, are you the parenthetical or the nut inside the shell?)

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. As should be obvious, this is very definitely based on the musical, which is why Hamilton and Mulligan are former drinking buddies with a minimal age gap. But it is true that Washington had breakfast at Hercules Mulligan's house to publicly demonstrate his confidence in him after the British fled the city, and it's also true that Hamilton later helped Mulligan's son into a law career.
> 
> 2\. Just some thoughts on Hercules Mulligan's disappearance after the first act, despite not being dead or in France, and his general absence from the later parts of Hamilton's life, as well as the general absence of certain people--the enslaved, the poor, "the ruffians"--from the historical record more generally. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
> 
> 3\. I have the serious misfortune of posting this on the same day as the new installment of "Delope," which also--with more warmth and less sarcasm--deals with the Mulligan/Washington breakfast and touches on Cato's presence in the Mulligan household. [Read it](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5365331/chapters/12847435): it's lovely.


End file.
